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Gravity Art Space Exhibit Uses Stairs as Metaphor for Life
We Have to Look Down to Know What’s Up is Gravity Art Space’s second of three group exhibits featured in the gallery this month. The works largely revolve around the image of the stairs as a metaphor for societal narratives.
For the six artists who contributed to the project, the staircase shows the way life tends to pigeonhole us with a specific pathway, and how the world tends to work to ensure we stay on that path for our lives.
“Threading this path of truth seeking is akin to the use of a staircase. Some being straight forward, others labyrinthine or steep and the effort can be [grueling] depending on the ascent or descent,” the exhibit write-up said.
No Stairways to Heaven
Using the imagery of the stairs, many of the artists display their skepticism at the way society disseminates information. For instance, Mark Bardinas’ vivid “what goes up must come down” shows an Escher-esque stairwell floating above the ocean, forcing its users on an endless cycle of ups and downs. His other work, “snakes and ladders,” displays a ladder going to a hole beyond the sky while guarded by an angry snake.
Mark Nativo’s “As long as we get there,” meanwhile, offers a different perspective: a ladder going up to a slide, which ends up turning into its own set of stairs.
For the viewer, some of these paintings show a collective frustration at how society forces us to either repeat the same mistakes or to never find the solutions we seek. We sometimes don’t get to understand or know better because the world we crafted never allowed us to.
“The simple act of telling the truth is countered by digital manipulations, false narratives and the erasure of actual histories to hide the brutality of how regimes established themselves. Those that are vocal are either submitted by intimidation or drowned into the sea of irrelevance by the useless data that are pumped out to keep us distracted, entertained and stupid,” the exhibit write-up said.
The Hope in Endless Travel
And yet, some of these paintings could also be interpreted in a less pessimistic way.
“Precipe,” a painting by Rene Bituin, gives us an end to the stairwell: a rock with a sundial, overlooking the world around us. It’s a strangely hopeful image, that maybe the knowledge we seek will have a definitive end.
![[From top] "Script Written in Figures" and "Script Written in Forms" by Harvy Armada. Photo by Elle Yap.](https://bluprint-onemega.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/20240716_153502.jpg)
Meanwhile, Harvy Armada’s “Script written in figures” uses polymer clay on paper to create a stairway-like look that keeps going upwards. It leads us to wonder if truth is so hard to find, or maybe it’s just something that needs to be interpreted.
A Matter of Perspective
Another painting, Jobert Cruz’s “The more things change, the more they stay the same 1-2,” shows an escalating staircase within a colorfully-uneven city landscape. The second version of this painting displays the stairwell upside down, a less straightforward climb than the first.
Marybob Arce’s two “Indefinite” paintings show two pictures of steps in a stairwell cut into boxes of nine. The center of those boxes then reveal a zoomed-out picture of the stairwell. Both Cruz’s and Arce’s works change the perspective of the stairs to simultaneously show the ease or difficulty of the journey. And from there, you can surmise yourself: maybe the challenge lessens from a different perspective.
We Have to Look Down to Know What’s Up revolves around interesting images that expand the metaphor to something compelling. “Life being a journey” is a well-trodden cliche we all know. And yet this Gravity Art Space exhibit creates new images that explore the idea further.
Related reading: Gravity Art Space’s Artist Talks Demystify the Creative Process
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